Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Long-burning fuse

The Taliban are winning -- or at least it looks that way in Pakistan. They may not have taken over government (not yet) but they are responsible for growing anarchy.

America continues to support the weak regime of Benazir Bhutto's husband, but you'd hardly know it.

Four years ago, when an earthquake struck the high mountains of
northern Pakistan, the American military used its tremendous logistical
resources to ferry aid and shelter to the victims, and for a time the
tarnished image of the United States gained a lustrous new sheen in
Pakistan. This time, the proximity to a war zone and the extreme
sensitivity of the Pakistani army have prevented American aid in the
form of heavy-lift helicopters and medical personnel. Instead, as
Holbrooke said today in Islamabad, the U.S. has provided half the total
funding for the relief effort, and President Obama is asking Congress
to commit another two hundred million dollars. But Pakistani politics makes it difficult for the U.S. to claim
credit, and for vital American assets to be used to help what has
become the world’s largest group of displaced people. So this time,
with the political stakes incredibly high, our help is almost
invisible. ...George Packer, New Yorker

Obama's speech yesterday was right on target, but there's no denying that, once you move beyond the inspiring words, the new president is heir to a very frightening world situation. Probably the worst can be found in Pakistan. Nowhere is the danger of the situation in that nation described with more frightening clarity than in this week'sNYRBby Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. President Zardari cowers in the presidential palace in Islamabad while the Taliban advance.

The sense of unrealism is widespread. As the Taliban stormed south
from their mountain bases near the Afghan border in northern Pakistan
in late April, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the parliament
that they posed no threat and there was nothing to worry about.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik talked about how the Afghan government
of Hamid Karzai was supporting the Taliban and how India and Russia
were sowing more unrest in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the inscrutable,
chain-smoking army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, remained
silent. By the time Kiyani made his first statement on the advance of
the Taliban, on April 24, the army was being widely and loudly
criticized for failing to deploy troops in time.

Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the
government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist
revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more
territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary
uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as
in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious,
long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have
lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.

Suppose Bush/Cheney, determined to wank their way into a politically useful war, had at least chosen to contain the real enemy...